Last night I watched We Need To Talk About Kevin and was really impressed with the use of sound. British sound designer, Paul Davies, did an excellent job of helping the story evolve and, in particular, evoking an emotional reaction in the audience. One of the sounds that really stood out for me was his use of a garden water sprinkler, which was used throughout the film mostly in very tense scenes, often when there was no screen relevance. And it is only during the last moments of the film that the audience discovers the significance of this sound. But what I really enjoyed was the way the sound was used to create an anempathetic effect.

To quote Michel Chion:
"the anempathetic effect is employed when, for example, in a very violent scene after the death of a character some sonic process continues, like the noise of a machine, the hum of a fan, a shower running, as if nothing happened."

One of the most famous uses of this effect is the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. There is also a scene in Antonioni's The Passenger using an electric fan.

Another Antonioni one, 'Blow Up', the sound of the leaves rustling with the wind when the photographer discovers the dead body in the park at night, and realises that he didn't prevent the murder. So serene and creepy.

Here's another: At the beginning of The Fog (the original John Carpenter), when a stone mysteriously falls out of the wall in the old church, startling the priest and revealing the creepy old book, he drops his radio and it starts playing uptempo jazz music over what is otherwise a disturbing supernatural event.